Symphonic pastorals redux
Our experience of the environment relies on all the senses. In this chapter, Aaron Allen introduces non-musicologists to the relatively new field of ecomusicology. He argues that for musicology, the genre/idea of the symphony is laden with prestige; for ecocriticism, the pastoral has similar stature and is a genre/mode central to the discipline. In the concise juxtaposition of these two terms, Allen illustrates ecomusicology, which connects ecocritical and musicological scholarship, and further outlines a brief critical history of selected symphonies in relation to the pastoral. He makes the case that symphonies – ostensibly a textless genre of music conceived as abstract – can relate ideas about nature. Such connections between disciplines, approaches, and materials contribute to the larger effort in the environmental (post)humanities to break down humans’ problematic and the self-destructive nature-culture binary.